


divine entropy

by bam_cassiopeia



Series: empyrean microcosms [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: 404 Ben Solo Not Found, Alternate Universe - Canon, Alternate Universe - Dark, Body Horror, Dark Reylo, Eldritch, F/M, Horror, Kylo Ren is a momma's boy nonetheless, Lovecraftian, Schrödinger's Dove, The Dark Side of the Force, The Force, Unreliable Narrator, but not really there's only one side of the force here and it's the eldritch one, don't eat that you don't know where it's been, get in losers we're going to kill god
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-08
Updated: 2020-03-08
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:48:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23064247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bam_cassiopeia/pseuds/bam_cassiopeia
Summary: “Too powerful,” his uncle says, looking down with a frown at the babe born with eyes open and dark and full of galaxies. “He’s a star-eater, that one. Better drown him now.”(Ben Solo is born a bad omen in a time of celebration, or maybe an attempt at balance from a force beyond understanding, a seed of darkness waiting to blossom and flourish.)
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Leia Organa & Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Series: empyrean microcosms [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1657492
Comments: 27
Kudos: 111
Collections: Reylo Hidden Gems, Spooky Gems





	divine entropy

Ben Solo is born a bad omen in a time of celebration, or maybe an attempt at balance from a force beyond understanding, a seed of darkness waiting to blossom and flourish.

(Ben Solo is born wrong.)

“Too powerful,” his uncle says, looking down with a frown at the babe born with eyes open and dark and full of galaxies. “He’s a star-eater, that one. Better drown him now.”

“He’s _bright_ ,” Leia Organa says, holding her son with arms like a fortress. “Brighter than even you.”

Luke laughs, humourless and defeated already. “Bright like a black hole, maybe.”

“Like a sun,” his sister snarls.

(His blood turns acidic before he walks, falling in fat, sizzling droplets that eat at everything, and Leia cries painful crystal tears when she finds out, staring at the trail of holes left in a priceless carpet when her precious baby boy cuts into his forearm to show her the black ooze in his veins.

“He’s too young for the changes to start,” she tells her husband. The sound of her father’s mechanical breathing echoes in her voice, the fears she doesn’t dare name yet.

By the time Ben Solo talks, he brings cold with him. Soon enough, his bare skin will burn those protected only by flesh, and Han Solo will risk losing his fingers to frostbite every time he touches his son’s naked face.)

***

Still half a galaxy away, Snoke looks beyond the surface of his mind, immaterial spindly fingers brutal and inquisitive. Blood vessels burst under the pressure, but no amount of power can take the old creature through the storms raging around what’s left of Ben Solo; no amount of power can spare him from the knife-sharp winds or the flaying cold.

 _I’m surprised they let you live_ , the master tells his new apprentice, sucking on mangled, frostbitten fingers.

He shrugs, grinning through the taste of his own cursed blood, tells the truth to the creature: _My mother loves me, bless her._

Snoke never looks that deeply again. He doesn’t need to, to feed on his pupil’s power.

(It’s worth it, to let the old thing siphon him slowly, worth the occasion to look _back_ , to see the puppet master hiding on his lost planet, to find the word _dyad_ and taste the fears of the last Sith, fears older than him, thousands of years of dreading to be the last, of dying a pathetic, forgotten wretch, a whispered failure and an unheard death rattle.)

***

One: _You need a teacher._

Two: _We can rule together_.

Three, but not yet: _You can’t refuse_.

And she won’t. Third time’s the charm; it’s happened before them, a thousand times and one. It will happen again, unless --

(“He’s a star-eater, that one,” his uncle said once. “Better drown him now.”

“Word of advice, Plutt,” her mother said once. “She’s a menace, that thing. You’d be better served if you gave her to R’iia.”)

It doesn’t matter how they’ll be named; light and dark, fire and ice, life and death, they’ll be the last, and if he needs to burn every world in the sky and drain every star that ever graced it, if he needs to consume every life and bleed the Force itself --

Then he’s just getting started.

***

It’s almost too late, when he realizes what she is and who she is -- accepts that when the scavenger wedged herself into his mind, untrained power clawing too deep, too desperately, arid desert winds bursting through his barriers, hot and dry and howling --

\-- the missing half of himself slotted into place, burning him to the core, searing him deeper than his grandfather’s lightsaber ever could.

If he ever meets with Chewbacca again -- and if the fates are kind, they won’t -- he’ll have to thank the Wookiee for that bowcaster wound; thank him for avoiding a killing shot, and thank him for his own poor performance during his duel with Rey. He might have killed his desert girl if he hadn’t been bleeding out. Part of him still wonders how her heart would taste, the marrow of her bones, the clear fluid of her brain; rich and sweet and bitter at the core, he imagines, painting the angles and curves of her limbs behind his eyelids, her burning heart in his hand, all crackling sounds and wild, stuttering beats.

 _You’re disgusting. Monstrous_ , she thinks at him, too enmeshed with him not to know, just as he knows her revulsion is at her own fascination. She keeps saying no, his desert girl, but she’s divested herself of any real conviction already; she basks under his words just as she does under the sun on the cliffs of Luke Skywalker’s lost little island, drinks them with the hurried thirst of someone who’s never known true satiation.

 _Your cunt will taste just as sweet, darling_ , he replies, and laughs at the spark of heat she pretends she doesn’t feel, one that has nothing to do with the Force.

(On the imploding Starkiller, half-dragged by Hux and half stumbling on his own, he swears her death is his, hungers for it with enough intensity he forgets to feel pain.

“I’m going to eat her,” he vows, swaying on his feet, drunk on blood loss and unbearable anticipation. “All of her. Crush her sweet little bones and turn her to dust and make fucking _seasoning_ out of her. Fuck her too. Make her _scream_. Rip her heart out of those pretty bird ribs and tear into her soul just like she did to me, see how she likes it -- bleed her dry ‘til all that’s left inside her is me --”

“Shut _up_ , Ren,” Hux barks. “You’ve made yourself into enough of a spectacle already.”

He doesn’t need to see his face to feel the man’s disgust. In the too-small space of the shuttle it’s an acrid smear, but still he grins at the General and shoves two fingers deep into the cut on his face. “Such a gift,” he says, savouring the clarity of purpose the pain brings. “Such a gift needs to be repaid.”

 _I promise, sweetheart_ , he thinks, and somewhere on his father’s ship, the scavenger shudders in shared hunger and revulsion that’s all her own. He savours that, too.)

***

“Luke will help,” his mother says when she sends him away. “He will -- I promise.”

Ben Solo scrunches his nose and tilts his head. “You know that’s not true.”

“I don’t know _yet_ ,” she snaps. “Listen to me, Ben Organa Solo,” she adds in a furious whisper. “I love you. I would burn down the galaxy for you -- do you understand? There’s _nothing_ I wouldn’t do. But --”

“But you can’t help me,” he says. “I know.”

(It’s his mother’s true strength, resisting the lulling call of the Force, of the power thrumming in her veins. She keeps it folded tight around her, hardening her bones and straightening her back; it keeps her will stronger than durasteel, gives her presence the density of a neutron star, lends power to every word she utters.

It’s not something she can teach; it comes naturally to her, just like it comes naturally to Ben Solo to radiate outwards and leak darkness and cold, to take in the things no one else hears or sees, ever-seeking for his missing piece.

It’s not something the doused flame of Luke Skywalker can teach either: Ben Solo’s uncle might as well be dead, cut off from the Force as he is, self-exiled from himself.

He’d die before doing that to himself. To anyone else. Even as a child, even before he has the words for it, he knows that the way he knows lies from the truth: he’d rather be consumed by the Force, turn into a black hole and blindly consume in turn, forgetting everything but hunger, than ever closing himself from the lifeblood of the cosmos.)

“Your power will eat you up,” he tells Rey, willing her to understand what it means, where that path leads, the glorious end waiting for her. “At the rate you’re going, you won’t need five years to burn anyone who touches you. You’ll create deserts in twenty, thirty if you’re lucky. Just like me. Unless you stop using the Force -- but you don’t want to stop, do you?”

“No,” she admits, teeth that could be sharper than any predator’s worrying at her lips. “It feels…”

“Right,” he finishes. “Like you’re doing exactly what you should. And you are.”

“Am I?”

He shrugs. “Whatever you want to do is what’s right.”

“I want to defeat the First order,” she says, still so very short-sighted.

(The truth, he whispers in her collarbone after she leaves him for the second time, is that she can rule over the Force just as it rules over her. _We don’t have to be slaves_ : the secret he’s kept and nurtured, the seed she’s brought new life to.

 _I have never been a slave_ , she replies, and he laughs at her lie until she silences him, mouth angry and bruising.

Her bones glow, lighting her from inside, golden and beautiful and intricate inside the prison of her skin. Maybe she’ll blind people before she burns them -- but not him; never him. She smells of sun-beaten sand and desert spices and stale sweat and dry remains turning to dust and under it all, a whiff of ozone, of the Force itself. She tastes exactly the same.)

***

He feels it when Luke Skywalker dies; in the vast expanses of the galaxy, there are so very few Force users left that they all seem to burn brightly against the dark velvet of the void, and his uncle was a beacon of banked power. Without him, it’s Rey and Leia and Kylo and a shriveled old thing on a forgotten planet.

No one comes close in power, and the dozen other weak signatures are negligible quantity.

(They might as well be gods already, the four of them; Mother Daughter Son, and the ancient Emperor trying to claw his way back to forever, too fearful of death and oblivion to accept being a thing of the past, one whose story is over already.

It’s always old men.)

Without Snoke to drain him of his own power, it’s easy to sink Crait’s rebel base under the salt flats, the sound a slow, grinding break in the fabric of the universe. The first stone of the avalanche he’s waited to start since before he was born; and more pragmatically, a demonstration and a reminder for his own people. He needs them still, and if their respect means nothing, awed fear will at least keep them in line until he’s done.

***

He chooses no title once his master is dead at his feet and the shriveled thing hiding behind too; he needs no such thing when his dominion will be temporary. His underlings thought him hunting ghosts, and he keeps them in the dark, Palpatine and Exegol his secret -- they matter little, puny powerless humans.

He’s beyond that already, sight set on the next step, the next rung on the ladder.

 _Mortis_ , he thinks, the name sweet poison, the most blasphemous of promise.

( _What’s on Mortis?_ , his desert girl asks, small fingers and blunted nails at his throat, drawing pinpricks of blood she’ll come back to later, pretending she can kiss her own marks away.

 _Everything you could want._ )

***

Ben Solo dies young: when Kylo Ren tells his father _your son is dead, I killed him_ , he’s not lying. He killed Ben Solo in a cave infused by the Force on Dagobah. Ate the heart too; he remembers the taste, rot and pain and the tang of midichlorian-rich blood. He still has the scar, glowing dimly with diffuse ethereal light.

The thing that replaced Ben Solo’s heart in his chest is shriveled and bleeds black but it beats still. He dreams of Rey ripping that thing out to make it hers, of her mouth on the wound she’ll leave.

She dreams of kissing him after, sweet and tender.

***

He’s generous; sacrifices his own men and never Rey’s little friends, and his quest requires rivers of blood. The Sith of old have the darkest, most demanding and crudest of rituals, but it matters little if it means tearing open a door to the World Between World, if it means finding the right time, the right place, and toppling the Force from its pedestal and _becoming_.

The right time, the right place: the dawn of time, before there are children, when it's just the Father on Mortis. _It's always old men_ , Kylo Ren thinks when he surprises the not-quite-god with a lightsaber through the chest, followed by his hand, tearing a still-beating heart, warm and soft and juicy --

\-- Han Solo searches for his son on Starkiller Base and never finds him; he lands back on D’Quar a hero anew but with failure in his heart and shakes his head _no_ before Leia Organa can even ask --

\-- “He’s _bright_ ,” Leia Organa says, holding her son with arms like a fortress, when what she really means is _why should I care, he’s my boy, my baby boy_ \--

\-- “Fire on Dantooine,” Wilhuff Tarkin orders, mouth twisted in a cruel smile. “Alderaan will be next, I think.” --

\-- “Like a sun,” Ben Solo’s mother snarls, a lie she wills to be true, pouring power in her words --

\-- “...final check-ups Sir, which means we still need twelve hours before Starkiller can be declared fully operational.” The technician swallows, mouth dry under Armitage Hux’s glare. “If you’d rather we can target Hosnian Prime only -”

“ _No_. No, we’ll wait.” --

\-- “You can’t refuse godhood,” he tells Rey, triumphant at last, the taste of a god’s blood in his mouth, richer than anything he’s ever devoured but her. “You _can’t_. I’ll lay waste to the galaxy again and this time I won’t rebuild it.”

“It’s blackmail,” she replies, but her heart beats too slow, _thud-thud-thud_ in rhythm with the cosmos already, godhood seeping into her bones as it does in his.

“I remade the universe to spare you the choice between selflessness and selfishness,” he says -- pleading, even here, even now, at the end and beginning of all things, his victory frozen in time.

“You shouldn’t have.” Her eyes make a liar out of her, wide and luminous and starved. Here and now, at the end and beginning of all things, she is more herself than she ever was, his stubborn desert girl; of course she says no, and doesn’t mean it.

(She takes his hand.)

**Author's Note:**

> Another break from longfic labour, unbetaed etc.
> 
> I'd like to thank Poppy Z. Brite for the pseudo-cannibalism kink, my id for everything else, and TROS for nothing at all, but mostly my grandma for her terrible catechism. 
> 
> I still [tumble into the void](https://and-then-bam-cassiopeia.tumblr.com/) and I do [ the tweety thing](https://twitter.com/bam_cassiopeia/) here and there.


End file.
